#bro i would love to be a giant supercomputer

[doakaptan]

code lyoko: a hidden gem of early 2000s cartoons

pov: the year is 2009, every day you come home from school to watch an unidentified cartoon on channel JoJo; only for it to disappear and never come back to tv ever again.

Hello, it is that time of the week again. I will cut the chase for you so- Basically, this semester greatly tired me and in order to go along until the school year ends, I watch shows that evoke nostalgia to get high on the feeling of temporary happiness and dissociate for a while. I am not even addressing the monstrosity that is the midterm, father-son and the holy spirit help a bro out, please. And well, Code Lyoko is exactly that show.

(from left to right: Yumi, Jeremie, Aelita, Ulrich <3 and Odd) (there is also William in later seasons but I don’t claim him)

Originally released in 2003 but, received international release just as it was canceled in 2007, Code Lyoko is a French cartoon that graced everyone’s televisions at least once before it completely disappeared from it. For my experience, I encountered Code Lyoko on a channel called JoJo while I was waiting for Yugioh GX to start.

At first glance, it honestly looked horrifying with how children had comically big foreheads but, the story and the visuals hooked me right in. First of all, I could look past the giant foreheads because the characters were good-looking for my 8-year-old taste and, the background illustrations are still beautiful regardless. Despite being beautiful, the places didn’t change much and we only saw the school, dorms and the forest that was behind it along with the old factory and the word of Lyoko but, the budget for the show was not the biggest so most of the scenes were used and reused again and again throughout the seasons.

I’m not going to lie the visuals were not as pretty as I make them out to be but, I was 8 years old and it was the first time that I ever saw a cartoon that had both 2d and 3d animation.

Also, I fell in love with Ulrich but I’ll get to that. 

No, no I won’t

This is also a call-out post to me because apparently, I love everything that came before the internet and being online 24/7. Just like in How I Met Your Mother, as we are watching the world is introduced to the internet and what being online means so if I were to say that the third season is an inquiry on what the internet is and, how it works, I would not be that far off. 

( Also recently Code Lyoko was added to Netflix so yeah go stream it )

To dive right into the plot: a Japanese, and 3 French(???) middle school students walked into an abandoned factory through a sewage canal and discover a supercomputer that had an artificial world (Lyoko) in it with another artificial intelligence in the name of Aelita trapped in it. By contacting Aelita they alerted an evil system that lived within the Lyoko called X.A.N.A that manipulates and hacks electronic devices through the powers of Lyoko. So as any other logical human being would do they materialized Aelita into the real world and created her a fake identity to make her study with them while they fight against X.A.N.A in both the real world and the artificial one, Lyoko. Then the school principal asks, "Why did you do that?" And the overly intelligent 12-year old that somehow hacked into the national security system and created a fake identity for an artificial intelligence replied, "Well I am a classic nerd that fell in love with an artificial intelligence I had to make her real at some point!".

Yeah... that was not funny.....

Anyways, so this is basically the entire plot of the Code Lyoko brought to you by a walked into a bar joke that did not escalate!

4 friends along with their new materialized friend Aelita try to protect the world against X.A.N.A and whatever it is trying to achieve... Is it ever clear what X.A.N.A desires? I’m not sure. I’m currently rewatching the show and I’m on season 3 but I’m kind of lost on the plot since I only care about what’s going to happen between Ulrich and Yumi...

SO, the kids spent most of their time trying to defend their school, friends, or themselves against X.A.N.A and honestly it looks like a tiring job. They miss important days, quizzes, exams... man... I don’t think they are even attending school... But worry not! Lyoko has a program called "Return to the Past" and when they are successful in defending the world against X.A.N.A in Lyoko, they get to return to the past and not miss whatever that they dropped to reach the abandoned factory. 

I vividly remember wishing, praying, crying myself to sleep to have a computer like that when I was a child. I still do actually. It would be great if I were to spend the whole day beating up various machines in a virtual world then set back the time to retake an exam that I already know the questions of. Ah, a university student can only wish...

Code Lyoko was mostly sloppy in animation due to the budget cuts that had to be made in order for the show the survive but, it made up with the heart and soul it carried. The characters are all fleshed out, just like the locations and you can sense how much thought went into each and every detail the show carried. I don’t know if it's still available on the internet but I would suggest everyone who read until this point to look into the bible of the show. It is one of the greatest bibles I’ve had the pleasure of reading through. 

The show aired in Turkey in 2009 on channel JoJo. The entirety of the first season and a few episodes from the second season were aired but it was pulled from airing shortly after to give Yugioh GX more slots since it entered its final season. One of the reasons was probably because JoJo pulled most of its audience from airing Yugioh. I would not blame them since I discovered Code Lyoko while I was waiting for Yugioh as well. 

After Code Lyoko was pulled off from airing I forgot about it and did not think about it until recently. During our first year, while I was talking Asya’s ear off about an unrelated cartoon, I randomly remembered the theme song of Code Lyoko, and all came back to me. The sweet nostalgia. I also remember making my friends at the table watch a few episodes of it during our lunchbreak. 

I am honestly glad that Code Lyoko was not one of the cartoons that got away from me. Aside from the addicting nostalgia, it gives me, it holds such a special place in my heart that I don’t think any other show can fill (maybe Yugioh GX can fill it but I will have to debate it with myself for a while).

So please, if you have time give this low-budget french cartoon a chance it will not disappoint you.

(also just a warning ulrich and yumi’s pining is one of the slowest of burns I’ve ever witnessed so be careful while rooting for them)

[secret-diary-of-an-fa]

Crash Bandicoot 4: Better Than You’d Expect (a Review)

Right, you horrible lot. I promised you a review of Crash Bandicoot 4 and, as I appear to be the last stable person and/or thing in the chaos of modern Britain, I suppose I had better deliver. I would say something about Xmas, but what with this being International Year of the COVID Virus, there sort of wasn’t one. With that in mind: Crash 4- what, why and is it any good?

As a kid, I used to really like the Crash Bandicoot games on the old PS1: the levels were beautiful and imaginative (although, to this day, the ‘Road To Nowhere’ level and its sequel in Crash 1 can fuck right off), the characters were funny and compelling and the move-set was entertainingly bonkers. Naturally, Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time (and yes, that is the real title) pushed my Nostalgia Button even faster and harder than I’d push Boris Johnson down and endless flight of stairs, given half a chance. It helps that it’s superbly well-made by a developer that clearly cares deeply about the games and not just the selling power of their brand name.

The game is a direct sequel to the original three Crash games and sweeps the intervening efforts from lesser developers under the great rug of history. For the most part, this is probably wise considering that their quality usually hovered somewhere between ‘sewage’ and ‘being trapped at a Beyonce concert without a cyanide pill’ (yes, Internet, I still hate Beyonce. Just because I haven’t mentioned it in awhile, doesn’t mean I’ve warmed to the catawalling bint or her irritating ubiquity on otherwise-acceptable supermarket mix tapes. That would require a frontal lobotomy and the removal of my ears, but I digress). I do think it’s a bit unfair on Crash: Twinsanity, which at least had an interesting core gameplay concept and some funny dialogue, even if it wasn’t very well-realised on the mechanical level. But ho-hum: I can nit-pick later during the loose ‘what I didn’t like’ section- these early paragraphs are meant to be mainly praise.

The actual plot concerns an escape attempt by Neo Cortex and N. Tropy, who were apparently trapped at the beginning of time after the events of Crash 3. News to me: I guess you had to collect all the hidden extras to see that ending and, while the 90s were a much slower decade, I still didn’t have time for that shit, even back then. Anyway, they break back into the timeline, in the process shattering reality itself and forcing Crash to make his way across the multiverse and different worlds at different points in history in order to stop them. There’s not a lot of complexity there, but as a justification for having the levels all be radically aesthetically different and providing a jumping-in premise for fan favourite characters, it’s a plot that does its job. Despite it’s simplicity, it’s also offered up with a surprising number of twists, fun cut-scene asides and surprising little narrative flourishes. The re-introduction of Tawna (Crash’s girlfriend from the first game who was tastefully removed after the original developers fired Kevin The Furry from their team) is kind of sweet and handled pretty neatly. And I mean that in the sense of ‘aww, that’s sweet’ not ‘Ah, sweet, bro’, just to be clear. She’s obviously not the same character from the original games, but the developers have taken care to give her enough quirks and entertaining lines that she’s not just the standard ‘Badass Action Girl’ trope made flesh. The levels that where you get to play as Cortex and get into the head of a cartoon evil genius are fun, too, even if they don’t tell us anything about the character we couldn’t have figured out for ourselves.

As with the original games, the worlds and levels have a really idiosyncratic and stylish look. Just looking at the scenery is a blast. My personal favourites are a level clearly based on New Orleans in the middle of Mardi Gras, the planet Bermagula and basically all of the levels set in a Crash-ised version of Feudal Japan.

As nice as the levels are to look at, they’re mostly pleasant to play through, too, with a staggering variety of different gameplay elements coming together to create intricate challenges. That said, I should stress that the phrase ‘mostly pleasant’ comes with a massive, throbbing caveat, which brings us neatly to the designated gripes and nitpicks section of this review.

You see, while the levels are mostly well-designed, there are individual platforming challenges that just lump too much together for any normal person to keep track of and then demand that you solve them at speed and they break the delicate, wafer-thin boundary between ‘fair challenge’ and ‘taking the piss’. Actually, the incidents of this phenomena towards the start of the game take the piss. By the later levels, they’ve graduated to demanding other bodily fluids, too, such as tears and blood. I feel like the developers were a bit too in love with the original games’ reputation for punishing difficulty and got into a bad habit of opting for design choices that emulated it over design choices that were fun.

I also feel that, considering the game takes place across a time-shattered multiverse, the levels might have been a bit more varied. Don’t get me wrong, there are some gorgeous and brilliantly creative worlds on offer in Crash 4, and every level is a visual blast. However, with the single, solitary exception of Bermagula, every alternate universe you visit is ultimately a reflection of something familiar from our own world or culture. N. Sanity Beach is… well, it’s just a tropical beach with generically tribal ruins a bit further inland. The Hazardous Wastes are just an off-brand post-disaster planet Earth that owes more than a little to the Mad Max franchise and where you’ve definitely seen every individual component before (even if they’ve never been assembled in such a Crash-y way until now). Then there’s the made-entirely-of-pirate-tropes world, the Japan-but-not-really world, the Inevitable Fucking Ice World (which keeps getting included in games despite the fact that uncontrollable sliding is even less fun in precision platformers than it is in real life) and the Generically Futuristic City world, because the old Crash games had them so this one has to as well. None of these worlds are bad- like I said, I enjoyed all of them, and the others that didn’t quite merit an honourable mention besides. It’s just that I feel like greater flights of fancy could have been taken: we could have seen some truly alien geography and architecture; viewed whole of evolutionary timelines, all through the lens of Crash’s brilliantly slick, cartoony art-style. The only truly ‘out there’ world we visit is Bermagula, which takes up precisely one fucking level, then that’s your lot: it’s back to Crash-y versions of Earth locales.

I’m also not a big fan of the ‘gems’ system. Yes, it’s great that developers chose to use the gems that were such a big part of previous games to unlock funky little cosmetic bonus costumes for the playable characters. On the other hand, the outfits you unlock should be tied to the number of gems you have overall, not your ability to collect certain numbers from specific levels. That way, your wardrobe would be a measure of your general skill at the game, not of which levels’ platforming challenges you were most willing to put up with for multiple play-throughs.

I’m tempted to compare all this to the superlative one-two punch that was Rayman: Origins and Rayman: Legends- two of the best platforming games ever made. With the exception of a couple of fuck-off unreasonable boss fights, the platforming challenges in those games were perfectly, legitimately fair. Insanely tough sometimes, but fair. Their level and world design also nailed the ‘weird-as-fuck flight of fancy’ vibe as well. Even the Inevitable Fucking Ice World in those games had the decency to throw in some giant cocktail umbrellas and slices of lemon to make you feel like you were ice-skating your way through the world’s biggest Martini while a fucking dragon in a chef’s hat tried to bit a mountain in the background. They also tied cosmetic unlocks to overall performance.

None of this is to say that Crash 4 isn’t good, it’s just that it doesn’t quite measure up to the gold standard set by the Rayman: Origins and its sequel. If it helps, think of it like comparing The Talos Principle to Portal. Yes, the former is good, but it’s never going to outshine the latter’s star. I recommend Crash 4, but if the last platformer you played was the undeniable high water mark of either of the Raymans, just remember to adjust your filters going in.

Before I go, does anyone else find it funny that these games have such colourful, kiddy-friendly aesthetics and characters yet demand a level of competence and coordination that’s usually only achieved by more seasoned, grown-up gamers? I mean, there are challenges in Crash 4- admittedly optional ones- that might one day be completed only if a being comes into existence that has the reflexes of a supercomputer crossed with a surprised feline and is made entirely out of thumbs.

And on that horrifying mental image, I must say goodnight. Tune in next time for my usual end-of-year roundup.